Boston Public Radio Podcast
Best Of BPR 9/19: The Choice & Taxachusetts
Today:Legendary Frontline filmmaker Michael Kirk previews their latest film highlighting “THE CHOICE” voters have between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.And, Boston Globe business columnist Shirley Leung discusses a murky new pro-business group fighting Massachusetts' high-tax reputation.
- Broadcast on:
- 19 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Support for Boston Public Radio comes from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Be revolutionary. UMass is the Commonwealth's flagship public research university, and committed to the relentless pursuit of progress, learn more at umass.edu. And Cambridge Savings Bank, where they are committed to your financial well-being and community is at the core of everything they do. Cambridge Savings Bank, always you. Or at CambridgeSavings.com, member FDIC. I'm Jim Brody. And I'm Marjorie Egan. This is the best of Boston Public Radio. New daily podcast from GBH, featuring our favorite conversations from our three hour radio show in under 40 minutes. Don't panic. If you love filling your phone with episodes of our full show podcast, you can still find it anywhere you get your podcast, or just catch us live on 89/7 GBH, starting at 11 o'clock. The podcast, The Legendary Frontline filmmaker Michael Kirk previews their latest film, High Legend and the Choice, voters have between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. You'll learn a hell of a lot about both. And Boston Globe Business comments Shirley Young on this secret new business tax group fighting against progressive taxation and multi-millionaire Bill Belichick complaining about taxotuses. Here's the show. So we're joined now by veteran frontline filmmaker Michael Kirk, behind this year's production of The Choice, a two-hour documentary that delves into the histories deeply of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The film starts out with their childhoods. Here's Trump's niece, Mary, and his art of the deal ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, describing Trump's ruthless family life with Grandfather Fred, or Mary's grandfather, but his father Fred at the helm. Life is a zero-sum game. There's one winner, everybody else is a loser. If you're not winning, you're a loser. Unfortunately, he didn't just have that philosophy in the context of his business. He ran his family that way. The way the game got played in his household was, if you did not win, you lost. And losing was, you got crushed. Losing was, you didn't matter. Losing was, you were nothing. And Harris's Howard University classmate Jill Lewis, I hope I've pronounced their last name right in her closest childhood friend, Stacey Johnson Batiste describing the challenges Kamala face Kamala Harris face as a biracial girl in America. She talked about having suffered racial slurs for both of her cultures. She had received racial slurs for being a black person and racial slurs for being someone of South Asian descent. It was very important for Kamala to make sure the girls grew up and knew about their black heritage and because they would be viewed as black girls. Kamala was the mother, of course. I hate the expression something is must see television. This is must see television. The choice airs Tuesday, September 24th at 9 on GBH2, PBS.org, Frontline and the Frontline YouTube channel. Michael, yet again, congratulations on a terrific piece of work. Oh, it's so great to see you two again. It's always the sign that I've crossed the finish line. And we're glad you did. And we're going to finish line. Ben, this year, we'll talk about that in a couple of seconds. But for people who don't know, tell us what you've been doing with the choice. I think since '88, is that when you said you started? '87, yes. '87. I didn't make the first couple, I was still in grade school at the time. But I've made this is the sixth one. And the theory of it is not to deal with policy in a kind of straightforward way or issues, although they certainly work their way in. But to start with biography and measure the two candidates by the memories and observations of close friends, family and biographers, and in some cases, journalists who've followed them closely. The idea be, and then it's a weave. So you've got six minutes of Trump, six minutes of Harris as you go through. Harris as you guys have done here, the idea of concentrating on his father at the beginning and her mother at the beginning, could there be two more different perspectives from the two parents than those two? We're going to delve into what you discovered and shared with us in a second. But this question is being asked of you not as a citizen of the United States, but as a filmmaker. You're in the middle of doing the choice for 2024. You wake up, or maybe you're awake already, and find out that this guy you've been profiling, Joe Biden is not running for president. And you're also not sure right away who the nominee is even going to be. What was it like for filmmaker Michael Kirk? We had on July 8th, I think it was July 8th, we had a four hour rough cut we showed of the Biden and Trump story. This is going to be ultimately a two hour film, but we had really, and it was a completely watchable thing, it's like, you know, you could sit and watch, oh my God, this is amazing. I didn't know how we were going to cut it down. Well Joe Biden helped us out there, he dropped out, and the Biden stuff just evaporated proof. The good news is Rainey Aronson, the executive producer of Frontline, had been insisting on a one hour film that we also make for October about the vice presidents. So we had been researching at least, we didn't know who the Republican vice president was going to be. But we had been researching Kamala Harris under the assumption that Biden would keep her. And we immediately, Dovin usually takes four months to do each character and edit them. We shot in two, we edited, we researched for two weeks, edited, shot for two weeks at 27 interviews and edited in five weeks. So somehow we got it together and sometimes when there's a fire in the house, you discover what's really worth saving of the valuables, and there are a lot of valuables in this film that we managed to save, I think. But it was the challenge of my career, a head spinning, a time because we figured we had all this Biden stuff and why waste it. So I talked to Rainey and she agreed that we put a two hour Biden piece up, all Biden's decision, which aired within nine days of his decision. So we were plenty of late nights to get that together and then we rolled over into telling the Harris story and the Trump story, not knowing at all the details of the Harris story. There were no documentaries have ever been really made. There was a CNN thing that Abby Phillips made. There was no real definitive biographies made. There was very little archival footage that we'd ever seen and could find. But the team jumped in in a way we went. Well, before we get to Kamala Harris, let's start with a baby, we're not baby Don, but you start with baby Don moving up to adult Don. I love the details about how we used to throw birthday cakes at people and knock the blocks over if somebody was playing with some blocks. But you have a piece about talking about Roy Cohn, who was so influential in his life, that would be Trump's life. Ken Letta of the New York Daily News is talking about the alignment of Donald Trump and attorney Cohn while the Trump family business was facing this federal discrimination lawsuit. Here's the sound. When they met Roy said to him, "You might be guilty. It doesn't matter. Go after the Justice Department. Don't ever admit guilt. Fight it. You'll kill them. Just deny everything and fight." And Trump was totally taken by that. He hired Roy Cohn as his lawyer. And boy, talk about something that has characterized his life. How is it a little bit more about their relationship? He was, he was a, he was his father to Trump, you know, Trump's father had sort of put him on the back burner even though they were, he'd given him a lot of money. He wasn't acting like a father, really. So Cohn delivered that. He was a friend. He was a constant companion. And he was the creator of the Trump playbook, the thing we see every time Trump steps up, you saw it in the debate, push back, accuse the other person. Never admit you're wrong. Shake your fist at the establishment. It's a relatively ideology-free set of arguments that Cohn gave him. It was just a way of operating that essentially said, "Do the most outrageous things there are. You never lose. You will never lose." That dovetailed with his father's imperative that we are only winners in the Trump family. It really was everything Donald Trump needed to go forward through. The business world where he had plenty of mistakes and was a big loser many times, lots of casinos in Atlantic City and other places. But never, ever, ever has admitted the failing or the mistakes or that he ever lost. And that's all from Cohn. And we should say this first experience, this first litigation where they did never admit loss, despite what happened, was a lawsuit filed against Trump and the business for racial discrimination in housing against black people in particular, denying them or discriminate against them in housing choices. And obviously, people know Roy Cohn from the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy's, as a hell of a legend. Ursat's father is Roy Cohn. Can you talk a little bit about real father and son in the case of Donald and Fred Trump? When Donald was a boy, he had an older brother who really had the birthright of the father's birthright. It was his namesake, Fred Trump Jr. And his dad thought Freddie would be, they call him Freddie, Freddie would be the winner in the family. And Donald was just sort of pushed off to the side where he was, eventually, he acted up so much he was sent to military school. Now Freddie moved along with his father in business, but as Freddie's daughter, Donald's niece, tells us in the film, he was too nice a guy. He had friends. He had activities outside the family, and the father just detested that. And Freddie didn't really have the stomach for things like the federal litigation against the company. That wasn't Freddie's style. He was a go along and get along kind of a guy. Donald senses this while he's away at military school, rising as a cadet at the academy. And basically, as one person in the film tells us, he's like a hot wind, breathing behind his brother, getting closer and closer to his father, who eventually throws the power, the love, the attention to Donald, and Freddie is sent off to the side. He becomes an alcoholic, an airline pilot. They mock him for that. Donald and his father, they say, "All you are is a glorified bus driver." And Freddie dies of a heart attack at 42. Yeah. You know what I thought was incredible though. I think most people would think that if their son or daughter became an airline pilot, we're talking about great big airplanes flying across the country. They would view that as quite successful, but not in this family. No, Fred's senior was all about business all the time. He'd take the kids with them on the weekend and they'd pick up nails at building sites to save some money. He was just a guy who said work, work, work all the time. And that kind of worked. And a very, very successful builder of apartments in Brooklyn, thousands of them as a matter of fact. Freddie was not a killer, was what he was not, and he had to be a killer in this family. And then you have the contrast of an incredibly strong mother that brought up Kamala Harris, who came to United States as an immigrant at 19 years old, I believe you reported all alone. Alone, she was born in a brahmin cast in India, her father was a diplomat. She wanted out of India, she didn't want the caste system, she was very bright, came to America, Ph.D., work as a cancer researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, and really, incredibly for the late '60s, strong woman, and strong independent woman. Mary's a black man from Jamaica, Donald, and they have two daughters, Kamala and Maya, and Shyamala. And then they get divorced and the father becomes less and less connected. Shyamala was determined to raise her daughter, Kamala, who she saw as black in America, living in Berkeley, in the heart of the Panthers and all of that anti-war movement and everything else, the Martin Luther King movement. She said, "I'm going to raise my daughter because of her skin color as black and went about the business as an Indian woman of raising her daughter as a young black American woman and pushing her for the rest of her life for justice," which is what she firmly believed in. You know, I'm going to say something. Borderline ridiculous. It'll be nice to me because we're friends, Michael, but every time I watch these films over years, every four years, I am stunned by how much people of great power are formed when they're little kids. I mean, if you didn't know what happened to Donald Trump, maybe you wouldn't know in his great agori detail. You watch just the part of your film, and by the way, for people who think they know everything about Donald Trump, you don't until you watch this film and surely not about Kamala Harris, you see him as a little boy. You see his tactics from the birthday cake throwing to, "You got to be a killer," to essentially stabbing his brother in the back, and you could see what he becomes. And you see this little justice fighter with a justice fighting mother as a little girl in Berkeley or whatever, and you can really see the formed human as an adult. It's really rather incredible, do you think? I have a piece of paper hanging here next to my monitor where we had it, I had it remotely. And here's what it says. "A president can bring to the job no more than the lessons of their own life." And I try to really, I don't know who wrote it. I stole it, obviously. I didn't think of that, but I forgot to write down who said it. So if somebody out there is listening in it, and they said it, I'd love to know so that I can quote them. But a president can bring to the job no more than the lessons of their own life. The corollary is something like, "Show me the person at seven, and I'll show you these dollars." Well, you know, speaking of showing someone at seven, I think it was after that, correct if I'm wrong, that Kamala Harris, her mother got a job in Canada. And they go to a very, basically, Lily White Place, having left California behind, a freezing cold place too. So tell us about that. She's her mother's one tough person, and she gets kind of passed over. She's the only woman in the group at Berkeley. She gets passed over. She fights to stay there, finally realizes it's not going to work out for her. And as the story goes, it takes a very good job at McGill University in Quebec. And moves 12-year-old Kamala away from Berkeley. Can you imagine, to mostly White, the French-speaking school, and drops her in there. And you talk about training for being a duck out of water. It's just you're taking from one place to another. And you have this additional, I guess, burden from some people's perspective of being black and Southeast Asian, so you're biracial and you don't speak the language. Good luck to you. You know, I was trying, I don't know if they can be perfectly equated. I'm curious to know what you think. If there was one moment in the film where you depict as formative an experience in the future life after childhood for Kamala Harris as compared to the relationship and teachings of Roy Cohn, it's this thing that I really didn't know about about the killing of this cop. Yeah. Espinoza, here is journalist Joe Garafolo describing an early career moment for Harris when she was the DA in San Francisco. She goes against the establishment and refuses to seek the death penalty. She had pledged as a candidate not to support the death penalty for this guy, David Hill, who murdered a police officer and then Senator Dianne Feinstein, who at the time was the most powerful political figure in California, publicly chastises Harris at the funeral. Here it is. Just months into her new job. If you are a young person new into your job and someone who is at the top of their game comes in and basically calls you out in public, in front of all the people you have to work with, police officers, you can't imagine how gut wrenching that would be. So Harris does not relent on the death penalty thing, but she does appear to change a bit in terms of risk and confidence. Well, explain how she grows out of that experience there, Michael Kirk. I think of this, Jim and Marjorie as the core struggle for Kamala Harris as I read everything. The first place her mother was appalled that she wanted to be a prosecutor. She wanted her to be shaking her fist from the outside, not going inside the system and certainly not going in as a prosecutor. That was a dirty word in the '80s in Alameda County and in San Francisco, but she does. And then she runs for office and then she gets the office. And now she's deeply inside as a prosecutor and playing the inside game and this happens to her. And what happens? She backs away from controversy. She learns, the lesson she learns is if I'm going to play the inside game, I'm going to do what it takes to get things moving in all the little ways you try to do things inside a structure. I'm not going to make grand pronouncements anymore. Yes, I stood up for my campaign promise that I wouldn't seek a death penalty, but I will try never to do that again. And that has actually turned out to be more or less true. She takes big stance, especially on things she believes in, but not controversial stance. She stays back. She thinks it through one of the unknowns about her as president will be, how will she react to what is inevitably a job where you're a hockey goalie that's coming every day? And you got to make big, big, big decisions on controversial things and statements. She tucked it in, she held it closely and her friends, many of her friends, all of them that we talked to that were black women said, this is what a black woman has to do inside. She's not going to take controversial stance. A black woman to rise up in the '80s and '90s in America, it was hard enough for women, in general, a black woman rising up had to learn how to handle this kind of thing, these inside battles and that Kamala Harris, the way they talk about it, did what she had to do. But when you look at her experience, I mean, it's pretty long, right? She's a lawyer. She's an attorney general. She's a United States senator. She's a vice president. D.A. Absolutely. And you know, and she did, as you pointed out earlier, go to Howard University of Black College in Washington, which of course put her right at the seat of power, and I'm sure that was a big influence with her too, but she's certainly experienced. And she certainly has been, more than I knew, credited throughout her career for her star power. I mean, we remember, I remember her best from the 2020 election when I thought, and I think she was that great. And then we've seen this star power emerging only more recently after she came out of the to run for president and of course abortion, where she was very passionate about. Yeah. It's an astonishing thing about her, the way that she gets, there's something about her. This is, I've been, as you guys have, doing politics all my adult life. And you know, when you're in the presence of star power, political star power, you just know it. You know who has it, and you know, who doesn't have it. Mitt Romney, for all the things he was good at, was not, did not exactly exude star power. No. Barack Obama, star power. You know, Al Gore didn't exude star power. His father blew a room away every time he walked in the room. And for whatever reason, this woman had it, and it began to just show up on a national scale as she became a district attorney, Oprah does a, we show a little bit of it, Oprah does a feature on Oprah, does a feature on her, she's a district attorney in San Francisco. But she's, she's got it, whatever it is, it may be a blessing or it may be a curse. We all know plenty of people who had facile star power, who didn't pan out. But she, she seemed to have it, and it, it moved her along much faster. She was only a senator for a year and a half when she runs for president. When she runs for president, you know, she'd been an attorney general in California before that, and a district attorney. But, but it's the, it's the way Obama did it, right, and right away, don't get, don't let your record catch up with you, your votes in the Senate, you know, go right away. That's what Tom Dashall told Obama within the first months of his senatorial, his time in the Senate. So, she took, she took the chance and thought she was cooked forever because of the failure of that campaign. They thought the window would never open again because of Hillary, because of Obama, then Hillary, it was going to be a long time before Kamala Harris could ever, could ever run if she wanted to. So Michael Cook, I always feel bad when you're on, you've done so much for us, and we do nothing for you. We're about to do something for you. We are? A very good friend of Margry's and mine just texted me and said, the source of that quote is Mark Twain. Now, we hope it is true, we haven't independently verified it, but if it is true, you are welcome. So, that's all we get. Hey, Michael, as always, this thing. Somebody else said it was Red Smith. Well, whatever. It's one of those two. We learned a huge amount, and as I said at the top, nobody who cares about democracy, they should miss this quadrennial version of your terrific, the choice in front line. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Thanks to you, too. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, Shirley. Hi, Jim. Hi, Margry. Hey, Shirley. So, you've been doing some great stuff lately, and this column about where DEI went to die, talking about Harvard University, has been talked about all over town. Jim's been talking about it for days, what'd you say? So, I was talking about what has happened to Harvard's leadership since Claudine Gay, the first black president, was pushed out in January. And when you look at the leadership ranks of Harvard right now, I think six of the seven major appointments made this year have gone to white people. And in three of those instances, they replaced black leaders. And so, it's incredible how much the diversity has really changed or the priority of diversity has changed at Harvard. As one professor told me, Harvard is where DEI went to die. Well, you know, a couple of it. You may also, one of the things you, I think the only person, Craig, me from wrong, who's a tenured faculty member who spoke to you as a guy who's on our show, quite regularly, Khalil, Jerome Muhammad. And he was singled out, as we mentioned the other day, by the chair of the Education Committee in the House, as his course being the root of all evil in America. So, we asked him, if the leadership that you were describing came to his support after he was attacked publicly by Congresswoman Fox, that he didn't- Certainly no support from Garber or any senior leaders of the university, that Dean of the Kennedy School, who's now a former dean, Doug Almondor, did- it sent me some notes of encouragement. So I will have to give him credit. Private notes of encouragement or public support? I can send you a private note if you want a private note. Fair enough. You didn't let that one slip off. Okay. So, there's that. And you also talk about the fact that a number of the recent appointments happen to be Jewish. And I am guessing, and you suggest that some with whom you spoke said that maybe to mollify some of the major donors, I am guessing, having followed this Harvard thing pretty closely, that you got a little blowback, did you, on that one? I did. I've been hearing from Jewish readers and Jewish leaders, a bit upset that I really bring their Jewish identity into the conversation. And you know, I just wanted to point out that four of the seven new leaders are Jewish. And that, you know, one could read it that, you know, there were some concerns from alumni and donors that there wasn't enough- the Harvard wasn't doing enough to address campus- growing campus anti-Semitism in the wake of, you know, the Israel-Hamas War. And so, some people think, well, maybe this was in response to that, you know? And I know it could be the third rail, right, talking about bringing up religion, Jewish religion in this context, but I thought it was important- I thought it was a relevant detail. Well, I should say I'm sort of Jewish, and I thought it was spot on as somebody who's observed this and has some connections to the place there. And by the way, I hope that the same people that are criticizing you for that are criticizing the president of Wesleyan College for calling Harvard cowards and giving in to Donald Trump of what his words were by declaring this absurd position of neutrality on issues that are not core issues. And I thought the whole point of the university was to have debates, you have to figure out how to do it in a peaceful way about all things that matter to your student body. So I am only one person, Shirley, but what Marjorie said is true everywhere I am going, people are talking about this column, and overwhelmingly, people are saying, "Thank goodness somebody is exposing the trigger." Shirley, can I ask you one last very quick question? I asked this to Khalil when we had him on. Harvard has got more money than God, multi-billion dollar endowment, probably if you name the most prestigious university in America, they might say, "Harvard, why are they so quick to knuckle under?" That's what I don't get. That's why they have a $50 billion endowment, by the way. That's right. That's how rich universities stay rich, right? Yeah, they could afford to go down to $40 billion, maybe $35 billion, you know what I mean? They look foolish. I mean, that's one of the criticisms about Harvard leadership right now is that of all institutions, they could stand up. They could stand up to everybody, you know, and it'll be messy, it'll be controversial, they could withstand that, but I don't think they like to be in the news this way. They want to be left alone, and as I write my piece that if you think about who got the new leaders at Harvard, why did they pick white leaders? They were the safe choices, you know? And so, I mean, also, I mean, some of those new leaders are interim, so hopefully, a year for now, Harvard will come to its senses and prioritize diversity again. Think about diversity, make diversity a factor again, and one of the things that really struck me when I was reporting this story was that I was surprised how, you know, Harvard is only a third, the student population, it's only a third white. So their leadership doesn't reflect, you know, the student body. Okay, so, Charlie, I want to be quiet here. There is a no secret group of business people who are forming. They won't say who's giving money. They won't say who the national PR firm is. They hired you and John Chesto told the story quietly. Can you tell us what's going on, please? Sure. Go ahead. Be quiet. All right, so this is what's happening. What's happening? So you remember the millionaires' tax? Yes. Yes. We do. That was from a couple years ago, and a lot of the major business groups were staunchly opposed to an extra surtax, four percent extra tax on incomes over a million dollars. And the business groups were defeated. They were outspent, outmanned by the teacher unions that supported raising this new, you know, creating a new tax. And the money from the new tax, the new taxes raised about $2.2 billion over the last fiscal year, and that goes to education and transportation only. And so the business groups don't want to be beat again. And they're looking to the future and thinking that this is not going to be the only ballot initiative that they'll be on the losing end of as the state gets more progressive. And also there's no kind of Republican candidate in sight to kind of, you know, promote a fiscal conservative. Were they out of state when Maura Healy ran her single most important issue was a billion dollar tax cut, and one of the first things she signed into law was a billion dollar. They missed that, by the way. Apparently. And so anyway, so this business groups in town have come together and they're launching this week, a new group called the Massachusetts Opportunity Alliance. They're raising millions of dollars. They're going to hire an executive director to kind of, you know, fight high tax, high government spending policies. Well, by the way, I wasn't being facetious in Shirley and John Chester's piece. They organized under IRS law so they don't have to divulge their donors. They won't say who the PR firm, which is really embarrassing, by the way. I mean, grow up. If you're upset about something, but there are a few people, there's John Fish had a Suffolk construction who, by the way, I got to know pretty well during his effort to get the Olympics here. So he's a really decent, straightforward case. I think he's wrong here. The high tech council, which has been fighting irrelevancy for years since Barbara Anderson died, Barbara Anderson and the high tech council were the anti-tax crusaders, then she died. By the way, do you know what? The high tech council's newspaper called Jim Brady on its front page in three-inch letters. Did you know about this, Shirley? I think he called him an evil genius. They did. It was one of the proudest moments of, I was back in 1990. But in all seriousness... He framed it. He put it above his death. The only thought was also noteworthy, and I was curious to know whether or not it was your choice in reporting you and John, or if they, well, they talked about taxation. They failed to mention the fact that you and we have discussed ad nauseam, the millionaire's tax, which was supposed to lead to the great exodus, and we don't know the data yet. You do know it's raised more tax money than was expected, which suggests not a lot of rich people, leaving. And secondly... The young people are saying... Well, that's what the mass budget, the center on budget and policy is suggesting. But secondly, did any of them mention to you? Of course, as Shirley just said, it is important that we added a billion dollars to the two most important things to keeping workers in the state, good transportation and good education. Any of them mention that? They did not, but they were very concerned about this tax-achusive label that has come back to haunt Massachusetts. Before the millionaire's tax, when you look at surveys, Massachusetts comes in kind of middle the pack in terms of taxes, and now we've moved up quite a bit in terms of a state that is not business-friendly and as it can be, and the taxes are a bit too high. You know who the primary person spreading the tax-achusive line is? Oh, Bill Belichick! Here he is. Here is former coach Bill Belichick, another column that Shirley had something to do with, on the Pat McAfee show talking about the new state, the millionaire's tax, essentially here. Here he is. It is virtually every player, even a practice squad, but even the minimum players are pretty close to a million dollars, and so once you hit that million dollar threshold, then you pay more state tax in Massachusetts, so just another thing you got to contend with in negotiations up there. It is not like Tennessee or Florida or Nevada or some of these things. Okay. So you actually look... I want to be like Tennessee. I really do. Memphis is the poorest city in the whole country. So you did a little research on how NFL players are affected by taxation in their states. What do you conclude? Well, I took issue. I weighed in because Belichick was seemed to be blaming the millionaire's tax for the reason why the Patriots aren't doing well and having to do well in the last few years. And as I wrote, "You don't need to be a sports columnist to realize it's because we no longer have Tom Brady." That's why the Patriots are terrible. No, it is true that during negotiations, players and their agents will bring up taxes. They look at that when they negotiate contracts. I think what was interesting was that when you look at... I thought that when he complained about the millionaire's tax, I thought we were at the top of the list like we were the worst state for NFL players, but we aren't. I mean, there are many more teams that are in higher tax situations like all the Californian teams like San Francisco 49ers. I think even the Minnesota team, is it the Mikey? The Vikings. Yeah, the Vikings. Baltimore Ravens, the New York teams like... Green Bay Packers. Yeah. Green Bay Packers. Really? Yeah. So when you look at the list, Massachusetts is about number 10, number 11, we're just out of the top 10. Now the millionaire's tax did move us up. We used to be in the middle of the pack and now we're in the top 10. In doing this story, I was thinking like, "Does it really matter? We're talking about players that make $5 million, $10 million, $20 million. What does it matter, they can save a few hundred thousand dollars on taxes or maybe a million dollars?" I talked to... There's tax accountants that specialize working with pro sports athletes and pro sports teams and saying... And they told me, "Listen, the average pro athlete, their career only spans about four years." So whatever money they make, it has to last a lifetime, like 30 years, 40 years, it has to last a long, long time. So it's like, "Okay, I get it." I appreciate that Bill Belichick, who was only making $10 million years of coaches, their spokesperson. That's really great. My belief is that any organization from any political stripe that does not believe you are entitled to know who is funding that organization deserves not one minute of your time. I don't care if they're progressive, reactionary, whatever they are. And these guys have got to decide if it's such an important issue or they're going to belly up to the bar and let the people know who they are. Thanks for listening to the Best of Boston Public Radio podcast from GBH. Our crew is Zoe Matthews, Aiden Conley, Nicole Garcia, Pamela Loss, our engineer is John the Claw Parker. Our executive producer is Jamie Bologna. You want to hear the full show? Download our full show podcast or tune in to 89/7 GBH, 11 to 2 each weekday. Today's episode was produced by Zoe Matthews. [MUSIC PLAYING]